Judge suggests Xinhua is a propaganda arm of Chinese government
Straight.com
by CHARLIE SMITH on FEB 15, 2013 at 1:42 PM
Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland’s Lexbase newsletter always includes some juicy tidbits—and his latest is no exception.
He highlights a Federal Court of Canada ruling by Justice Richard Mosley last month suggesting that a well-known Chinese news agency is disseminating propaganda.
It involved an appeal from an HIV-positive, Guangdong-born refugee claimant named Liyung Yang. She claimed that she was fleeing persecution because she belongs to Falun Dafa.
An immigration officer cited a Xinhua article, which reported that “China was making efforts to assist those living with HIV/AIDS.”
In dismissing the woman’s appeal—and, in essence, condemning a Falun Dafa follower to be shipped back to China—Mosley wrote:
“I am not persuaded that the Court should instruct Immigration Officers to, as a general principle, treat as suspect any information disseminated by a government owned and controlled news agency such as Xinhua. It may be propaganda in the sense that its publication is intended to present the government in a positive light. That is a phenomenon not unique to China.”
In other words, it’s okay for Citizenship and Immigration Canada to rely on information from Xinhua and other government-owned news agencies in making decisions, but recognize that it could be propaganda.
In a previous life, Mosley was an assistant deputy minister in the Department of Justice.